Amerigo Vespucci was born and educated in Florence, but soon moved to Seville, where he began a career in trade and finance. In the wake of Portuguese and Spanish navigators, he sailed to the New World, exploring the South American coast. An expert cartographer, he was the first to realize that the land he had reached was a new continent, not a hitherto unknown part of Asia.

The white marble bust is the work of Giovanni Battista Foggini, sculptor and architect at the court of Grand Duke Cosimo III de' Medici.